Ceolfrith

Ceolfrith was a Northumbrian monastic founder and abbot of the late seventh and early eighth centuries, remembered as the long-ruling head of the twin monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow and as the superior under whom Bede spent almost the whole of his monastic life. He was born of noble parentage in the kingdom of Northumbria in the mid-seventh century. Contemporary narrative sources do not record a birthplace or an exact birth year, but they state that he died in 716 in his seventy-fourth year. At eighteen he entered the monastery of Gilling, then governed by his kinsman Tunberht. He later moved to Wilfrid’s monastery at Ripon, where he was ordained priest in his late twenties. Seeking a more exact monastic observance, he spent a period studying customs in Kent and in East Anglia before returning to the north.

When Benedict Biscop founded the monastery of St Peter at Wearmouth in the 670s, Ceolfrith joined the new community and became its prior. He accompanied Biscop on a journey to Rome. In the early 680s Biscop established the sister house of St Paul at Jarrow, and Ceolfrith was made its first abbot, taking a small company of monks with him. A severe plague in the mid-680s struck Jarrow so hard that, according to the near-contemporary anonymous Life, Ceolfrith and only a few survivors were left to keep the Divine Office. After the deaths of Biscop and of the Wearmouth abbots Eosterwine and Sigfrith toward the end of the 680s, Ceolfrith was chosen to rule both houses as one community. He remained abbot of Wearmouth-Jarrow until 716, a tenure of more than a quarter of a century over the combined monastery.

Under his government the double house became one of the principal centres of learning, liturgy, and book production in Latin Europe. Ceolfrith enlarged the library begun by Biscop, secured papal privileges protecting the monasteries, and continued their building and liturgical development. The scriptorium produced three great single-volume Bibles, or pandects, of Jerome’s Vulgate. One of these, later called the Codex Amiatinus, is the earliest surviving complete manuscript of the Latin Bible and a landmark of Insular art; Ceolfrith intended it as a gift for the pope. Bede, who entered Wearmouth-Jarrow as a child and wrote the Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, portrays Ceolfrith as austere, liturgically exact, and tireless in the care of a community that numbered several hundred monks by the time of his departure. An anonymous Life of Ceolfrith, written soon after his death by a member of the same community, supplies further detail and is a principal source for his career.

In 716, advanced in age, Ceolfrith resigned the abbacy in order to end his life in prayer at the tombs of the apostles in Rome. He left Wearmouth in early June with a large party, taking the Codex Amiatinus with him. He died on the journey at Langres in Burgundy on 25 September 716 and was buried there in the church of the holy triplet martyrs Speusippus, Eleusippus, and Meleusippus. Some companions continued toward Rome with the Bible; others returned to Northumbria. Hwaetberht was elected to succeed him. Ceolfrith was venerated as a saint by his own community from the time of his death. His feast is kept on 25 September. No record survives of a later papal canonization, which is typical of saints of this period whose cults arose by local acclamation rather than by a formal process in Rome.